How should a left-wing progressive react to this? How should we try to live?

My first thought is that Justin must be allowed to suck, otherwise the terrorists have already won. We must oppose this boycott even if the result is ancontinuation of the kind of crap music that today's youth seem to like, that often doesn't even contain even one electric guitar, but just alot of synths making bloopy bloopy noises. Later, if times call for it, we can take their rights away and make them get haircuts.

Not that I'm entirely anti-Youth. Below is a clip illustrating how you can be a teenager and not be too annoying:

I was never into these guys until I bought a $10 t-shirt off the remainder rack in a hippy place on Yonge St. Then I figured I'd better down-load some of their stuff just in case anyone asked about the shirt and, yeah, now I'm a fan.

That's right, the LPoC is contemplating not rolling over on Bill S-10, which would mandate mandatory prison terms for whipping up a plate of hash brownies or growing a half-dozen (6) pot plants. I'm not sure the Harper Tories have given a name to this bill, but one good one might be the "Lets Bust Gramma Hippy Act" or, alternatively, "An Amendment To Imprison The Entire Population Of Saltspring Island".

In any case, I interpret Ms. Jennings words as a cry for help and guidance. If enough noise is aimed at the right people, this trivial but profoundly stupid bill may yet die.

Leadership hopeful Dana Larsen has the astounding ability to jam three dozen fatties in his mouth at one time. He can also roll 'em one handed...with his left hand! If the Dippers choose this guy, I don't know how they can be stopped.

By the way, I am including a shot of Derek Fildebrandt, who I have had the pleasure of debating on the Michael Coren show, because as far as I'm concerned he has world class hair. Up there with the hair of Gerard Kennedy and Pablo Rodriguez (but of the short spiky rather than long and ample variety). You can't really see it in the picture, but the tips of his hair are a different colour from the parts further back. Very sexxxy. I don't know how you get your hair that way. Its as though a man was crossed with some sexxxy wild beast.

My problem is, however, that Piers forecasts, which where not sufficient accurate, has been used against me in the national (Dutch) debate on climate change. I did never refer to Piers. But it was assumed that I support his view, (as a sceptic) which weakened my own case, because the Piers forecasts where seriously questioned and he has not as yet been prepared to show the basis for his forecasts.

And Hans Erren groused:

Piers missed today's severe gale. Combined with the absence of a forecast cold winter in holland I think there is not much confidence left....

Its funny that Corbyn should be getting so much play in the MSM when even his own tribe has raised questions about his methodology.

Incidentally, Climate Scientist and general badass James Annan has made a cottage industry of debunking Corbyn. He hasn't written much lately on the topic, but here's some of his older stuff.

And, also incidentally, under his real name Peter O'Donnell is one of the anonymous posters from FreeD that Richard Warman has launched defamation suits against. Warman is not only fighting Hate, he's out there saving mother Gaia.

Several Tory MPPs have privately expressed shock over the letter [written by Tory MP Scott Reid bitching about Tory MPP Norm Sterling]. And one senior Liberal said the party will use Reid's remarks against Sterling in the October 2011 provincial election.

Hell ya! Kinsella's down in the lab testing out Adverts now! He don't care that its Xmas.

While some have compared the anti-Sterling movement to a Tea-Party-like push, others have doubts.

"That's some weak tea," said one senior Tory, who cast aspersions on the power of Hillier's former group, the Landowners' to convert their populist message into real political muscle. Actually, the senior Tory is probably right. Looks like Hillier's landowner insurgency hasn't had much success to date.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

...somewhere over India, apparently. He must have already finished-up in N.A. because I got all my stuff.

Have a Merry Xmas, because you probably will anyway despite my best efforts. Unless you're in India and the rest of Asia, in which case try and think of The Grinch That Stole Xmas where the Who's wound up with diddly and eased their pain by singing. Singing always helps when you get screwed.

Watched that old cartoon last night, incidentally. Its great until the last few minutes when the Grinch wusses out. And aren't dogs wonderfully loyal creatures?

Friday, December 24, 2010

(Note: this is a shameless rehash of something I wrote way back in 2006. However, I think its just as relevant today.)Saint Nicholas, the inspiration for Santa Claus, was known for his fascination with children and prostitutes. In the "official" stories, these interests are described as being entirely innocent. For example, from The Lifesite:

"Legend has it that Saint Nicholas became aware of a desperately poor parishioner having three daughters with no dowry to recommend them for marriage. The father had planned to sell them into prostitution to provide some means of support. By night, Saint Nicholas secretly brought bags of gold on three separate occasions to the man's home. These generous visitations allowed the three daughters to have sufficient means to avoid whoredom and later strike a marriage covenant. On the third visit to deliver the gift, Nicholas was caught in the act of generosity by the grateful father."

But I once met a guy high up in Jesuit Order who knew the whole secret history of The Church, and he explained to me that this account was a total white-wash. If the truth had come out, Nicholas could have never been made a Saint. The real story is that for two nights Mr. Nicholas snuck in through a handy window to consort with these three vice girls, but on the third night he slipped on roof tiles and fell into some hedges, thus waking their old man!

And of course the girls' father was grateful! He got three bags of gold out of the deal. They were his payoff, his hush money!

In fact, father and daughters were in cahoots. The aforementioned marriage covenant was struck with Saint Nicholas himself, because daddy threatened to squeal him out in public. So Nick wound up living with with the gals Mormon-style, and in folk-tales they became known as The Brides Of Santa.

Nick was content with his lot, for the Brides bore him a whole gang of dwarf children, seven or eight of them in fact, including Grumpy, Smarmy, Sweaty, and Sleazy. But people got wind of their arrangement, and they fled Turkey with a torch-wielding mob on their ass. Eventually the whole motley crue landed up at the North Pole, which was pretty much parts unknown back in those days, and in any case ruled over by the loose living Swedes, who could be counted upon to look the other way with regards to the behavior of this rich bigamist and his midget clan.

Just to be safe, however, St. Nicholas grew a white beard, packed on a few pounds, and started calling himself "Santa". He made his kids shave, floss, and dress a little better, and started referring to them as "elves", which is the Viking word for "little white guy", in an attempt to compensate for their rather swarthy complexion.

So now you know.

Don't have any joy this Xmas. Remember, there's kids starving in Malaysia.

1. Maclean’s will publish a ‘rebuttal’ article of generous length from CCNC (ie. 2 to 4 pages or an article of similar length to the original article); Maclean's has already conceded to this, apparently. The folks behind the Steyn complaint, who asked for but did not receive the same variety of concession, should take heart. You've broken the ground that others have followed upon.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

As my readers will likely know, GMU (George Mason University) statistician Edward Wegman has been accused of plagiarism and other more serious offenses in the preparation of his Wegman Report, a document commissioned by U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) back in 2006, that questioned some of the scientific evidence behind AGW. This piece is the latest I've found on the topic, and the first to mention some of the other irregularities in the report that blogger Deep Climate and John Mashey were able to uncover. A few highlights:

1) It gives a brief account of Wegman's "social network analysis', which concluded that Mann and his collaborators operated as an illicit gang of rogue scientists. This analysis was mostly plagiarized but, as the story points out, the rest of it was crap:

...Camille Parmesan, a biology professor at the University of Texas and a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says this academic network is simply a function of a scientific career.

“It’s very clear that of course Mann is well-connected,” said Parmesan, who has not co-authored with Mann. “I mean, he’s a top researcher in the field.”

2) It makes the case that the Wegman report conclusions were shaped by Joe Barton and his staff:

Mashey...lays out a series of communications with think tanks and others -– events preceding Barton’s commission of the Wegman panel — that Mashey claims demonstrate active political interference in the findings.

The Mashey report says that the Wegman findings, which criticized evidence for climate change, could amount to materially false information presented in a report commissioned by a congressional committee, an act prohibited by federal law.

“I think these questions need asking, although it is not my role to judge the results, and some questions would likely only ever get answered by congressional or [Department of Justice (DOJ)] investigations,” Mashey said in the report.

The article goes on to note that, in the current political climate (Republicans rule The House), even if Wegman did commit a crime, he will probably not be called to account for it.

3) It updates us on the latest in the GMU investigation of the charges against Wegman:

GMU spokesperson Daniel Walsch said the university is reviewing the allegations against Wegman. But he was not authorized to say whether that review is narrowly tailored to the allegations of plagiarism or is examining the more-serious allegations of bias and intentional misinformation.So there you have it. More bakcgorund on Wegman here.

Google has released a new tool; they've scanned millions of books in English and other (mostly European) languages, and slotted every word from those books into a data-base. So you can run words you're interested in through their database and, based on their frequency of occurrence within the sample, get an idea of when the concept behind the word was born, when it peaked in its influence in society, and when it died away.

Here's a word/concept I especially dislike:Deconstruction: a philosophical movement that took The Left out of the game for 20 years during the 1980's and 1990s as trendy Pomo Theorists announced a revolution "at a distance of several centuries"--if I am quoting Derrida correctly--rather than doing anything so soiling as leaving their arm-chairs and organizing at street level (which of course the less hygienically concerned Right was happy to do).

So I'm glad to see its popularity finally beginning to fade. Furthermore, I suspect that it is more prevalent nowadays in the popular rather than the academic literature, where it has been superseded by equally stupid Frenchy concepts rather than the good, Anglo/German, hardcore analytic stuff.

Word up: the French make good wine and great novelists. Their philosophers have sucked since Bergson.

And just to add a bit o' scholarliness here. One of the preliminary results of analysing the database has been the conclusion that (sorry, I can't find the link) Freud is more deeply embedded in world culture than Darwin...

...which is true enough, and interesting in that Darwin's results remain well-established and Freud, while hardly gone away, has gone through all sorts of reputational to-ing and fro-ing.

Probably the fullest account of that mysterious memo and the real story behind KAIROS' defunding, as told by Dennis Gruending. Nice to know that KAIROS is still fighting on after being stiffed by the Tories.

Incidentally, I am sure I've seen a .pdf of the memo floating around the net. I spent last evening searching but have been unable to locate the thing. If anyone can point to it, I'd be interested in having a look.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

...on defunding Macleans Magazine can be found here. There are many reasons that handing 1.5 million a year to a product of the deep pocketed Rogers media empire is a bad idea, beyond the magazine's occasional foray into race-baiting. Norman Spector outlines them succinctly here.

And Ms. Poy is right: a magazine can indeed have its funding yanked for publishing offensive material. The protocol for filing a "questionable content complaint" is right there in the applicants guide to the Canada Periodical Fund (although I wrote that post ages ago and some of the links may have changed). Moreover, the provision has been used before, in the case of Catholic Insight Magazine, which was put on a "watch list" for a time to stop the editors from gay-bashing. So, once again, the cries of "censorship" are misplaced. Or at least, if there is censorship involved, it is mandated by the regulations of the fund. Got a problem with that? Lobby to have the regulations changed so that Kenneth Whyte and Co. and publish any filth they want on the taxpayer's dime.

Friday, December 17, 2010

R. G. Harvie is one of those Conservatives that I'd characterize as "wrong, but not far gone". He seems a decent sort, in other words. And he's got this idea for a small hero challenge thingy, where bloggers commit to "paying it forward" and "random acts of kindness" and yada yada yada. Sounds quite dubious to me. But the Xmas season seems to bring out the "dogoodnik" in folks...its the booze, I think...and if anyone is looking for a way to get it all out of their system they could do worse than to visit his blog through the link and contemplate taking up the challenge.

PS. If I steal some kid's candy and he doesn't bust a tooth on his jawbreaker, thus sparing his family some very expensive dental surgery over the holidays just after his dad got laid-off from the fish packaging plant, have I committed an "act of kindness"?

Anyway, I'm off to Walmart this morning to verbally abuse a few mall Santas. They can get fired if they throw a punch. The old "But you're not really Santa!" trick usually does it, especially if they've been drinking.

In the face of polls that are essentially stagnant, fans of the LPoC should remind themselves of the victories they've managed to salvage in 2010.

First off, the Harper Government's only real attempt at altering the fabric of Canadian society--Bill C-391 to repeal the long-gun registry--failed. And, not only did it fail, its failure seems to have taken the wind out of further Conservative efforts to destroy the registry. No assurances obviously, that the Harper gang won't campaign yet again on a repeal during some hypothetical Spring election campaign, but I sense a certain deflation of spirits among their faithful. For example, no less a personage than newly minted Conservative MP Julian Fantino suggested after the defeat of C-391 that it was time to move on.

What was particularly satisfying about the gun registry debate is that, as the tooing and fro-ing came to a head, polls showed a strong swing in favour of retaining the registry. This demonstrates that progressive values can still win out in our fair land if progressives are willing to fight for them.

Also, even though many Lib partisans are not particular happy with our new Afghan mission (me among them), and even though the party's strategy and tactics in the run-up to the vote on that mission were substandard, in the end I think you have to chock this one up as a win for Michael Ignatieff in that the defections in party ranks that everyone was predicting simply did not materialize. If one test of leadership is the ability to keep your troops in line, Iggy has passed this test on several occasions during the past year.

Well, its good to know that Iggy thinks the party is ship-shape for another campaign, and god knows they're alot more fun than watching the clown-show during question period, but I suspect this is still mostly bluster: the Libs will be able to negotiate enough out of Mr. Harper to find a means of supporting the 2011 budget. Or the NDP, who have had a rough couple of months, will. Or Mr. Harper will fly a plane over Quebec and shovel loads of English money out the side, and thus secure the Bloc's support.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

The Dawg says, and the Dawg only says what he knows. Weird though, Ezra was starting to pull stuff down and I thought he'd surrendered. Maybe the strain of not bullshitting got to him after awhile. But who's writing the cheques? This guy?

...will nevertheless comply with decision. McVety's 5-page rant can be found here. In it, he references Jonathon Kay's defense of Word TV that was itself censored by the National Post. Funny how things go sometimes.

You want another hint that absolutely dick all has changed? I offer you the dog that didn't bark: the absolute lack of Conservative threats to make any vote on Bill C-49, the Ending the Abuse of Canada's Immigration System by Human Smugglers Act, a confidence motion. Why their silence? Sure, this bill plays to the Torys "tough on crime" image, but its not something you can hang an entire election campaign on.

Sorry folks. My bet is we're stuck with what we've got until 2012, like a dead salmon on the beach, waiting for the high-tide of voter discontent (or at least the government's own term-limits legislation) to wash us to another place, but until that day, decaying slowly under the sun.

Stop with the insinuations that gays prey on children, and McVety's good to go, in other words.

Worth noting is that the CBSC is a non-governmental body set up by the broadcasters themselves. So all of this very tired talk of censorship and bureaucrats oppressing straight-talking Christians is not to the point. Certainly nobody has, as Jonathon Kay suggests, moved to criminalize Mr. McVety's opinions. This is simply a case of the private sector policing itself--maintaining standards, as it were.

Whatever Ian MacDonald might say, Stephen Harper's Xmas jam was something of a Youtube non-event. His cover of The Who's TheSeeker proved the evening's biggest hit, with about 18,000 views to date, and from there everything goes down-hill. For example, Share The Land, with only 874 views, clearly flopped. Libertarians probably bailed on it half-way through. And Sweet Caroline, with a whole 151 views, did even worse.

Compare that to the performance with Yo-Yo-Ma from last year, which gathered maybe 1,000,000 views. Looks like the CPoC returned to the well once too often with this gimmick.

And, when you think about it, 1,000,000 isn't that large a number on Youtube anyway. For example, this dancing dog has picked up over 8,000,000 visits in just over three months. I guess Stephen Harper's piano performances are the on-line equivalent of a "Canadian bestseller".

One common complaint re the wikileaks cables is that, for all the sound and fury, they haven't revealed much new information. I think that this claim has become more difficult to sustaing over the past couple of weeks. For example, have you ever heard of the Chagos Islands and their indigenous inhabitants, the Chagossians?

The Chagos Islands are a series of atolls that float peaceably enough in the middle of the Indian Ocean, part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Back in the 1960s and '70s, the U.S. decided it needed a naval base in the area, on an island without a "population problem", so hey presto! the Brits made a deal with (ie took bribes from) the Yanks and deported several thousand mostly African Chagossians off to Mauritius, where they still live today as their legal attempts to arrange a return to their homeland gradually founder. Meanwhile, in April of this year, the U.K. government declared the islands a "marine environmental reserve ".

Well, that would frost your ass, wouldn't it? The UK and US enlist environmentalists in their efforts to keep the Islands ethnically cleansed, so the Americans can keep operating their naval base in the middle of a whole whack of endangered species, including giant tortoises.

The government of Marutius sure wasn't happy when they got there hands on that leaked cable:

For me, this one cable justifies the release of the lot, as it reveals a tiny instance of government sponsored evil that would otherwise go unseen. Maybe once it was the job of journalists to do this kind of thing, but since they abandoned that role long ago, someone has to step in and fill the void.

Oh, and there's that other cable about how the Vatican was "offended" when Ireland's government decided to investigate the propensity of Catholic priests to rape young boys. That one too was revealing.

...the columnist and Wainio relied on different and conflicting sources. Council decided that while the sources relied upon by Wainio appeared substantially more reliable and persuasive than those relied upon by the columnist, it it was not in a position (except in one instance), to make conclusive findings of factual error, principally because it did not have the power to summon witnesses, or demand properly authenticated documentary evidence.

In the one complaint of factual error upheld, Warren made a mathematical calculation that could easily and definitively determined to be mistaken. But in any case, think about the lines above for a moment: the amateur (Ms. Waino) was consistently and substantially more reliable in regards to facts than a professional journalist at a respectable newspaper.

Nor did the OPC leave the Citizen itself off the hook:

The Council has no reason to believe that the publisher was aware of the possibility of any attribution faults at the time of publication. However, that possibility became known once the complaints were filed, at which time, in the Council’s opinion, the Citizen had an obligation to confer with the columnist to explore the attribution allegations and provide an adequate response to the complainant’s assertion that the columnist had failed to meet accepted journalistic standards relating to full and accurate attribution.

Of course, in such cases the journalistic tribe tends to circle the wagons and shield their own, so it isn't surprising there's been very little news of this decision in the MSM. Norman Spector is, as far as I can tell, the one exception to date:

Friday, December 10, 2010

...at an Ottawa fundraiser on Monday, December 13th, to help Gerard pay off some Liberal Leadership Campaign debts. Gerard will be making available these limited edition drawings of Lester B. Pearson (at left)

...who, very unlike Mr. Kennedy, appears to have been suffering his own personal mini-recession up top there. Further details are:

There have been all sorts of rumours of the Canadian Jewish Congress being absorbed into the Canadian Council for Jewish and Israel Advocacy (CCJIA), and a few stories in places like the National Post . This long but fascinating blog post from Mike Cohen, their one-time national director of communications, suggests that the merger is a done deal, and "Newco" is the code name for the emergent entity. Sad news, which probably means that the official politics of Canada's Jewish community will shift significantly right...what kind of Canadian council has Israel in its name, for chrissakes?

In any case, while most talk of the Stephen Harper Tories breaching Fortress Toronto has been baloney, if you're a Lib this bit of blue-skying ought to send a chill running down your spine:

I feel badly for someone like Farber, probably the brightest Jewish advocacy expert in this country. He has stood up to hatemongers and delivered countless lectures and presentations to spellbound audiences. His talent has been underutilized. It is time for Bernie to become a politician. For Stephen Harper’s Tories, I could not think of a better star Jewish candidate in the Toronto area than him. Add B’nai Brith Canada executive vice-president Frank Dimant into the mix as a potential Tory Senator and our community will really be well served.

Carmichael said the local PC executive told him he could not hand in memberships at the riding office on Friday. He said he was also not informed that voting would begin at noon Saturday and not 2 p.m. as had been stated on an earlier announcement.

Frankly, though, I'm not sure I see much to these rumours. Clark has already won the nomination, and been elected to the legislature, so I don't see how taking over his riding exec (which seems to be the gist of the rumour) would accomplish much.

In any case, there was some fun, Tory Turmoil related goings-on at Queen's Park yesterday:

And each "brand" would differ from its competitors by offering a competing "ethical protocol" for the release of whistle-blowers' documents. For example, a number of potential rivals have criticized wikileaks for

Assuming that this is the case (although even if it is, t'was not always so), other outlets might specialise in uncovering secrets from other regimes. And thus the free market for secrets will be served.

PS. John Young's website Cryptome is here. His issues with Julian Assange appear to be many and varied, I must say.

PPS. "Ethical Protocol" turns out to be a real word. Weird: I thought I'd just made it up.

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

I remember the day ten years ago a neighbor's daughter whispered to me about this new piece of software called Napster that would let you download music files for free. I tried it, and in late 2000 shifted to high-speed cable, along with hundreds of thousands of other Internet users. Around that same time, the American recording industry declared war on these Peer-to-Peer services, and users were compared to everything from criminals to communists, not always inaccurately.

These days, P2P is all a bit old hat; while many of the 1st and 2nd generation services disappeared under the entertainment industry's legal onslaught, they were immediately replaced by nimbler successors. Now everyone under 50 uses them, and nobody I know personally has bought a CD in the last 5 years.

Of course, the technology involved is very different, but the story of Napster 2001 has many parallels to the story of Wikileaks 2010, and the lessons gleaned from that earlier episode apply today.

And the first and most obvious lesson is: morality of the thing aside, you can't kill it. For the last several days, the world has watched our leaders play whack-a-mole with the wikileaks website; the only result has been hundreds of mirror-sites set up to host the leaked diplomatic cables should the main site be pushed off-line. In addition, word of wikileaks competitors has begun to emerge. Furthermore, if all of these were successfully driven from the Net, a simple zipped file stuffed with secrets could be released onto the various interlocking P2P networks noted above. And beneath all of these, in the very depths of the cyberspace, Ian Clarke's FreeNet--which was originally designed to facilitate exactly this kind of whistle-blowing--lies in wait as teh host of last resort.

The second important lesson is: if you can't kill it, you shouldn't bother trying. Most of those who have criticized the various calls for Julian Assange's death have done so on the grounds that these incitements are criminal/immoral. Less note has been made of the fact that creating a martyr for the hacker community--either in the form of Mr. Assange or his organization--would be profoundly stupid. The death (shutdown) of Napster did nothing but unleash a storm of technical innovation all bent on thwarting the authority that ordered this very same shutdown--bent on thwarting the record companies, in other words. And here we are ten years later with file-trading still flourishing and the music industry, by its own admission, in terminal decline.

And here's the thing: during its last days of existence, Napster executives were in furious negotiations with the major labels, and their business case could be summed up as: Après moi, le déluge. With us, you will get something; after us, the file-sharing world will fragment, and you will be unable to negotiate with the pieces. I believe that the international community is facing exactly the same situation with regards to wikileaks. It would be a much wiser course to deal--as in negotiate with--wikileaks, or perhaps one of its emergent rivals, towards an ethical protocol for the leaking of future documents. Otherwise, instead of files appearing with names redacted, we will have pure document dumps onto obscure Mongolian servers with no concern at all for whose interests might be damaged.

The international community ought to negotiate its own surrender, in other words, rather than face a rout.

Finally, the ongoing wiki-leaks saga bears a number of resemblances to the CRU Hack of 2009, in which private emails written by U.K. and American climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia, and uploaded onto a server in Russia. The content of these emails proved embarrassing for the scientists responsible, but ultimately trivial. More importantly, in the aftermath of the event a number of arguments against this kind of disclosure were made that prefigured the kind we are hearing today. Scientists, it was argued then, will literally produce less science if their every utterance is held up for scrutiny. Diplomats, it is argued now, will be unable to do their jobs if some of the advise they give is not allowed to remain secret. Today, as in 2009, the public response to such arguments has been the equivalent of a disinterested shrug. Millions of people read the stolen emails; millions more are even now reading the leaked cables. We are headed, it appears, towards an age of "enforced transparency", wherein anyone that knows anything will be forced to disclose what they know.

The Internet has already made it clear that humans have an insatiable desire for music and pornography. Now add to these a third thing: secrets.

I note that the material in the March 26th post judged defamatory is still there. Interestingly enough, in that case the judge misread the phrase "bald-faced contempt" as "bold-faced contempt". Ezra appears to be capitalizing on this tiny error?

In any case, I think we can assume that Ezra won't be appealing Vigna v. Levant decision. I would also point out that it is possible to overwrite a google cache, so if Levant wants to sink this material entirely, he can do that.

PS. Paragraph 142 of the judgement orders Levant to remove "all defamatory blogs referring to Vigna from his website within 15 days". It looks to me that what he has done is not in compliance with the judge's instructions.

And what's with Ezra Levant? His posts haven't appeared on the BT site for awhile now (weeks?), and I don't see him listed on the blogroll. I emailed Taylor a couple of days ago asking, but there's been no response.

Sunday, December 05, 2010

I hate to give him a point, but Kay's earned it: Joshua Blakeney's research should not be funded by a Canadian university, and his thesis adviser, Dr. Anthony J. Hall, is a kook. Both appear to be 9/11 Truthers, in the fullest sense of the word. As Dr. Hall writes:

Well, no, truthers are crackpots who have woven together wild, thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories to, for the most part, try and lay the blame for 9/11 on Israel and American Neo-Cons. Sure they exist out in the wild corners of the on-line world. What they are doing wasting funding and their students time in Canadian institutions is beyond me.

Let's quickly toss aside any nonsense about academic freedom. We do not let people teach Ptolemaic Astronomy in our universities, nor holocaust denial, nor the theory that God created Earth in six days, nor the theory that global warming is a conspiracy by Jewish scientists (another occasional Truther notion that I can't currently find a link to). And that's because such notions have been proven false, and of course the purpose of our higher educational facilities is to pass on knowledge rather than falsehoods.

It is entirely one thing to criticise Israel and the American Right on the basis of things they have actually done. It is another to criticize them based on lunatic fantasies. Mr. Blakeney and Dr. Hall have the stench of madness about them, and it infects also the institution that harbours them.

Mind you, Jonathon Kay still sucks, and his career will still end with him flipping burgers at a McDonald's. However, during those long-nights at the drive-through counter, he can at least console himself with the thought that he sucked less than usual on at least one occasion.

FreeD denizen Edward Kennedy has been mentioned on this blog a number of times during the past few weeks, due to his association with the OLA (Ontario Land Owners) and Randy Hillier's riding association. Ed now claims to have resigned from both organizations as of late-November.

However, this article from two months ago has her winning the nomination there. As a Liberal partisan, I must insist that the OLA redouble its efforts. And if any readers want to help fund their "rural revolution", they can go here. I personally have got $5 that I'm not doing anything with.

PS. Although I see that ex-OLA chief Jack MacLaren is doing his bit to keep the PCPO civil war raging. Maybe I'll send him an Xmas card. An e-card, obviously; I'm not made out of money.

Normally I would approve of anything that makes people miserable around the holidays, but recently I've been feeling inspired by the whole wikileaks thing, and have decided that, for this season only, I will be offering a pirated version of the famous buring fireplace here at BCLSB absolutely free of charge:

You don't have to thank me. Xmas-time visiters looking for something a bit more lively can watch the alternative video below. It's got nice music:

New stories on the PCPO civil war breaking out in Eastern Ontario. Two of them mention Hudak's promise to abolish the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a promise made to attract Hillier delegates to the Hudak cause during last year's PCPO leadership convention.

But, as Michael Warren notes in his Owen Sound Times editorial, Hudak hasn't talked about this plan much since winning the leadership race. And that's not surprising. Polling at the time showed that such a pledge would be a vote evaporator among the general populace. So Hudak put it in a little box and never spoke of it again.

Except that now he may have to so as to keep Randy Hillier inside the PCPO tent. Therefore, a sincere thanks (from myself and all Ontario Liberal supporters) to Randy Hillier for taking that item off the secret agenda and putting it squarely back on the, well, non-secret agenda.

Meanwhile, Ed Kennedy, the VP of the Frontenac Sector of Randy Hillier's riding association, says that Wednesday's meeting of the Carleton-Mississippi Mills PCPO riding association to choose its new riding executive was rigged against Jack MacLaren. He also calls Norm Sterling a "bootlicker":

Rather than finding warming concentrated in West Antarctica, we find warming over the period of 1957-2006 to be concentrated in the Peninsula (≈0.35oC decade-1). We also show average trends for the continent, East Antarctica, and West Antarctica that are half or less than that found using the unimproved method. Notably, though we find warming in West Antarctica to be smaller in magnitude, we find that statistically significant warming extends at least as far as Marie Byrd Land...

Eric Steig even shows up in the comments to congratulate Jeff and Co. on confirming his basic result Here: